


Beyond the Empty Skies

by antumbral



Category: Original Work
Genre: Did Our Duty For Archive And Fandom, Gen, Geocide, Science Fiction, Space Ships, Speculative
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-09-13
Updated: 2010-09-13
Packaged: 2017-10-11 18:28:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,333
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/115568
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/antumbral/pseuds/antumbral
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What could make a man destroy a world?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Beyond the Empty Skies

May 16th, 2857

The third planet from the sun is small and covered in a film of grey dust, its surface pocked with craters. An enormous basin, known as the Shalmirane Depression, dominates the southern hemisphere. Scientists believe that it was caused by a massive impact, which vaporized up to a third of the planet's mass on contact.

At the center of that great crater stands a white marble pillar, smooth but for the verse inscribed on its base:  
 _  
We pray for one last landing  
On the globe that gave us birth;  
Let us rest our eyes on fleecy skies  
And the cool, green hills of Earth._

Without atmosphere, no wind can settle dust across the plaque's face.

*

 

From Harkenson's _A Brief History of Space_ :

 _In the year 2300 AD, the first of the Echo-class colony ships set out for the stars. The Iphigenia, named for the Greek story of a girl taken from her home by the gods, was launched from the USA's Freefall Space Platform. In 2317 AD, it claimed the planet Chrysalis in the Andromeda galaxy as a colony of the United States of America. Other nations launched colonization efforts of their own, and by the year 2500 AD, every nation on Earth and over two hundred colonial planets signed the Declaration of Colonial Non-Aggression (DCNA) to regulate interplanetary colonization and trade. The DCNA agreed that nations would restrict their colonial activities to planets claimed in their own name, and that in the case of warfare, colonies would be considered neutral and non-aggressive territory._

 

*

 

May 23, 2856

Through the bridge window of the spaceship _Absalom_ , the planet Paxterra seems small and forlorn. Its green rings and stately blue surface loom steadily larger as the ship draws close, the rough blur of bands becoming chunks of individual rock, the planet itself resolving into swirls of cloud and the outline of landmasses.

In front of the bridge window stands a man, silhoutted against the planet's glow. His uniform is pressed into neat lines; his fingers curl, white-knuckled, around the steel railing.

"Starship _Absalom_ beginning planetary approach sequence. Disengaging primary thrusters. Crew is advised to find their stations and strap down in preparation for loss of gravity."

When the engines power down, the familiar hum of a working ship goes eerily silent. With no power to the artificial gravity generators, the ship floats for a moment without anchor. Pens rise lazily from desks and skate across the bridge area; a stray coffee mug flips end over end to scatter droplets into a frozen, suspended pattern.

"Standby to reverse primary thrusters on mark. Three… two… one… _mark_."

The entire ship shudders, rivets screaming as the enormous fusion engines work to slow her momentum enough to survive planetfall. The gravity systems reengage, and the pens cease their wandering migration towards the bulkhead and fall to the floor, rolling.

"Secondary guidance thrusters engaged. ETA for planetary re-entry: twenty-five minutes."

The polite electronic voice cuts out of the communication system, and on the bridge a custodian wanders out to clean up the spilt coffee. "Looks familiar doesn't it? Like a ghost, kind of," he says to the captain front of the bridge window, watching the blue-green sphere slide closer. His voice is tired, strained, unhappy, but this has been the state of the crew for the past week, and the captain no longer notices.

"Yes. I think we'll all be glad to be back on solid ground again," comes the reply. The captain doesn't turn around, and the flicker of lights on computer screens shades his silvery hair to red and green.

"Yeah. Hey… Captain? Do you think they know yet?" The custodian is finished mopping up coffee, but lingers, needing the conversation.

"They know. They've got the ansible. Someone will have dialed in, and when the signal didn't get through… well. The whole galaxy probably knows by now." The Captain sighs, tension across his shoulders and resignation in his voice.

"Sir?" There is a pause, and the Captain almost turns to see if the man is still there when the janitor continues, "Do you think this will change anything? Will Paxterra be different, now that…" he trails off.

"No. Paxterra won't change. We'll be fine."

After a few more minutes of silence, the custodian leaves.

"Ten minutes to planetfall," the electronic voice informs them.

 

*

 

 _In 2657 AD, a team of scientists led by Nobel Prize winners Antione de Kreznevski and Lydia Dalmer-Smythe created the first faster-than-light (FTL) communication device. Nicknamed the ansible after classic science fiction stories, the device took advantage of discoveries in String Theory to allow for the instantaneous transmission of data across vast reaches of space. Terra-colonial communications were no longer delayed by weeks or months, but could occur in real-time._

 

*

 

His house is in the hills, far from the flightfield, but only a short hop by jumperplane. Daniel Harwound can fly himself, which is a surprisingly uncommon skill among starship captains, and especially among highly ranked ones. Captains are managers, excellent readers and motivators of men, but rarely pilots. He was an engineer before he made captain, though, and he's had a pilot license since before he came to Paxterra as a colonist. Air currents are air currents even in a different atmosphere, and a good pilot can find them and ride them to save fuel. Paxterra is much like his native Ireland that way: the wind catches plane wings like a thousand grasping hands, throwing him towards the sky.

He lands on the strip beside his house. There's a button on his watch to open the door, and the security system disarms obligingly at his voice when he states his name. It's not a large house, but it's built over a hilltop, and he can see across the planet's fields. Here and there the long grass is dotted with sheep, and he can see from the position of the white flecks on one hillside that he has a fence that needs repair.

Once inside the house, he drops his bags in the middle of the living room floor, beside the fireplace. On the mantle are framed photographs: his little stone house in Ireland; a woman in Moscow, standing in front of the Kremlin and grinning widely; a postcard of the New York skyline.

Another photograph of Moscow at night hangs larger than the others on the wall above the mantle. It features the same woman, this time with her back to the camera, wearing a red dress that slinks around her hips. She's looking out over the lights of the city, smiling privately.

Daniel moves to the window that overlooks the hillside to further watch his sheep. Sheep are very rare on Paxterra, since they must be imported from Earth and are expensive. He flops onto a couch and leans back. Somehow, whenever he gets back from long trips all he ever wants to do is sleep, but he fights it, enjoying the drift of Paxterra's red sun over the sheep, watching a mother chase a lamb.

The planet seems peaceful, deceptively familiar. Ireland is a distant memory, but a potent one, and Daniel has regrets. He knows that he needs the sleep badly when the sight of green hills can pour him out and empty him inside. When his eyes finally slide closed, he is still facing the land.

There is quiet here, different from the peace of the stars but no less real.

 

*

 

 _In 2706 AD, the outbreak of the Nigerian Imperial Wars severely tested the precepts of the Declaration of Colonial Non-Aggression. Both the Niger Empire and the Sino-European Alliance possessed significant colonial holdings, but despite the nuclear destruction of Warsaw in the Battle of Belarus, the colonies of all nations involved remained neutral. The incident was considered by spacers to be a victory for colonial autonomy._

 

*

 

Repairing the fence takes three days, but the physical work is comforting. Daniel throws himself into a rhythm of muscle strain and repetitive motions, blanking his mind to everything but the feel of sun on his shoulders and the occasional bleat of the sheep.

The posthole digger is rough in his hands, and at the end of each day he pries splinters from his palm and bandages popped blisters after his shower, while the skin is still soft and pink and raw. There isn't much food in the house, but he makes do with calmia nut butter and grainy bread. He's too exhausted from the work to much more than sleep in the evenings.

He leaves the windows open, even at night when it gets cool. After months in the void of space, there is something primal and reassuring about the noise of the outdoors: small buzzes, the sleepy bleats of the sheep. Even the wind is comforting. Daniel is fifty-three years old and has spent thirty-two of those years in space, but more ingrained than long habit is the comfort of life-noises, written cell-deep and primitive.

After the third day, when all his fences are repaired and he has begun to repaint the siding on the porch, Daniel finds himself wandering down towards the stream that runs behind the airstrip. The great red sun reflects over the water, and Daniel sits down and stares ahead, watching the way the odd Paxterran insects skitter sideways and bob with the current over the rocks.

Clouds cross the sky. When the rain begins, Daniel thinks of how strange this place is, that he can see the red ball of sun even through the downpour, bright and inescapable. The insects make small leaps into the air, riding the droplets through the last seconds of their fall.

Each plop of rain into the puddle reminds Daniel of a small explosion: hundreds of little liquid mushroom clouds producing water vapor fallout. The insects seem unaffected, but Daniel has traveled with fusion engines for far too long not to think of tragedies. If those little explosions were real, the puddle that he watches could produce a crater several miles wide.

It's a melancholy thought. Daniel stands up to go back inside, then on impulse reaches down and picks up one of the little bugs. He names it Fred, and it lives in a dish on his kitchen sink for a few hours.

When the rain stops Daniel releases Fred back to the stream, thinking that maybe he's saved it from an explosive death. The thought makes him smile, but the expression is painful and fades quickly.

He likes the simple feel of Fred's legs tick-ticking over the back of his hand as the insect crawls back towards the water. When it balances itself on the surface tension once more, Daniel watches until the sky is too dim for him to see clearly, and Fred again becomes only one of the many insects skating on the stream. Daniel goes back inside, and does not think of explosions or of water when he sleeps.

 

*

 

 _The year 2779 AD saw the final tests of the most important technology since the creation of the ansible. Sequestered in a particle physics laboratory on the international Antarctic research platform, scientists Moria Sidelici and Paolo Artempi built and tested the first muon beam cannon. Muons are tiny negative particles, and when fired at certain atoms, shrink the atomic radius sufficiently to cause a fusion reaction. One such suitable atom was deuterium, which is conveniently found as a fractional component of all water. The muon beam cannon was a reliable, inexpensive way of producing a tremendous amount of power with very little mass, and refinement of this technology was the foundation of the near-light speed (NLS) fusion drives produced in the next century._

 

*

 

Five days after the _Absalom_ returns to dock, the buzz of insects fades into the whir of rotor blades, and Daniel steps out onto his porch to see a hovercraft landing in his front yard. He pads across the grass in thin shorts and no shirt to meet the two men that descend from the craft. One is familiar, Stephen Carscraft, the _Absalom_ 's first mate, but the other man Daniel has never seen before. Daniel is suddenly acutely aware of the freckles on his shoulders, and that his hair has not yet been combed today.

"Danny," Stephen greets him with a half-smile and eyes that say the other man is not precisely a friend.

"Hey Stephen."

"Captain Harwound." The other man extends his hand. "I'm Sergeant Tobias Scliero of Paxterran Space Command. First Mate Carscraft was kind enough to let me accompany him today. We have some questions for you."

"Is this a business trip, Stephen?" He keeps his voice mild when he asks the question. Stephen looks terrible, and Daniel wonders if he too wears that shell-shocked look, the pale one around the eyes that says he has seen terrible things.

He looks down at his raw, work blistered hands, his muscle-strained shoulders, runs fingers through his wild hair, and decides that he probably does.

 

*

 

 _In 2832 AD, fifty-three years after the creation of the muon beam cannon, engineers from Russia's Dorchov II colony and the EU's Bonaparte Orbital Station collaborated to create the first space vessel capable of near-light speed (NLS) flight. Designed by the legendary astro-engineering team led by Anica Freestrom, the ship was christened the Isolde, after the doomed Norse princess. The design depended on tanks of water which served as both temperature control systems for the crew on board, and as power to the enormous, rotating fusion engines that allowed the ship to speed up and slow down._

 

*

 

Daniel is vaguely surprised when the Sergeant does not debrief him immediately, but instead heads back to the hovercraft and begins pulling cases of equipment out. Stephen and Daniel help haul the cases into the living room, where the Sergeant displaces a mess of bandages and the remains of Daniel's breakfast to set up a tangle of microphones and speakers.

The mantle photographs get pushed aside to make way for eight large screens, which are hooked into a box, and the Sergeant fiddles with controls until the static on each screen coalesces into a series of faces. Daniel frowns, then reaches up above the screens to straighten the photograph of the woman smiling into the Russian night.

Daniel recognizes most of the men on the screens. They are diplomats, each the leader of a planet: Andromeda Prime, Sirius IV, Roharni Moon Eight, Adorno, Cassiopeia LXI, Witherian, Sirius XVII, Koriand. The Sergeant waves impatiently for Daniel to sit on the couch behind the coffee table, and when he and Stephen are situated side-by-side, the teleconference begins.

"Captain, we understand that you haven't gotten your full leave since the _Absalom_ came into port, but there are some questions that we desperately need answered. We understand that you were in contact with Starship Fleet Command last week?" The President of Andromeda Prime speaks first.

"Yes," Daniel begins, then leans forward so that the microphone balanced on top of an upended bowl will pick him up and starts again. "Yes, the _Absalom_ docked in Earth orbit at Freefall III, where we were debriefed by Starship Command, given new orders, and were deployed."

"Can you tell us what those orders were, Captain?" This from the representative of Sirius IV, an old man whose grey beard obscures his mouth as he speaks.

"I was told that certain colonies had been declared rogue by an alliance of Earth governments. Starship Command had been authorized to bring these rogue colonies back into line. Our orders concerned how to do that."

He doesn't tell about the shock on board the ship when the orders came through, the threats of mutiny. Some things are unforgivable on a starship, but Daniel understands men well enough to know that even unforgivable is not absolute in circumstances so dire. The idea of non-aggression towards colonies was holy in space, the single inviolate rule, and Daniel isn't about to sell out his men for talk of mutiny when some of them had family, homes on those colonies.

"You didn't exactly answer the question, Captain. What were your orders?"

"My orders were not to disclose the nature of our assignment to non-Command personnel."

"Commander, we respect that Starship Command demands the loyalty of its officers, but this is not the situation that you imagine it to be. We have not been able to establish contact with the Nigerian Empire or the Sino-European Alliance in over a week. We need to know what you were told. Specifically, Captain Harwound."

"We were given a list of colonies, and told to move into orbit around those worlds. We were to contact Earth again at that time to check in and confirm our orders, and if we heard nothing from them within twenty-four GMT hours check-in, we were to modify our fusion engines and fire on the planets."

He doesn't say "They turned us into a war machine." It makes him sick to think of the _Absalom_ used in that way, sicker still to imagine the negotiations among governments and empires to achieve the kind of agreement necessary to give those orders. Sick to imagine his own voice whispering, "Full power to engines," and he simply _doesn't_ imagine of the sound of a planet destroyed, the scream of the _Absalom_ 's hull as the shockwave passes by, then the sound of absolute emptiness in a swath of space that once was a world.

The silence in the room expands, grows oppressive. Eight, nine minutes tick by before the wizened old president of Sirius IV whispers quietly, "And for those of us who might not know, can you tell us what that would do?"

"It would cause a fusion reaction to begin in the water of the planets. Eventually, every drop of water on the planet would be consumed in a reaction large enough to blow the planet apart. They wanted us to commit geocide."

"And…" a tense pause as the Emperor of Koriand clears his throat, "And how many worlds were on that list?"

"Eighteen, sir, including Paxterra. We were supposed to blow up eighteen planets."

"Did you obey those orders, Captain?"

"The ship set a course for the first planet of the list, but before we left the Sol system we had some minor navigation troubles. We moved into orbit around Ganymede to fix those, and stayed there for seventy-two GMT hours, then continued for the first of the listed planets. When we arrived, we called to check in with Starship Command, but couldn't establish a communications link. We continued trying to establish contact for three days, and when we couldn't get a link, I chose to abort the mission, and set a course back to our home dock here on Paxterra."

"So no planets were actually destroyed, Commander?"

"None of the listed planets were destroyed, since we could not confirm our orders from Starship Command."

"Well, thank God for that. Dismissed, Commander. Enjoy the rest of your leave."

"Yes sir. I'll try sir."

 

*

 

 _After the success of the Isolde, two other NLS vessels were subsequently built by Freestrom. The Electra was the first of these ships, completed in 2842 AD. A year later, the Electra was tragically destroyed while in orbit around the moon Si4876, located in the Sirius system. The data recorder for the ship was recovered in the ensuing investigation, and it was discovered that the muon beam cannon had been tampered with. The beam was aimed at the surface of the ice-covered moon without the captain's knowledge, probably by an engineer on the crew, and when the fusion engines powered up to allow the ship to leave orbit, the resulting fusion of the ice on the moon went out of control, producing enough power to blast the rock apart. The Electra was destroyed by debris of the explosion. Sabotage was suspected in the ship's demise, but guilt was never confirmed, as the entire crew died of explosive decompression when debris breached the ship's hull._

 

*

 

The Sergeant is pale and keeps dropping wires as he packs the equipment. Daniel doesn't bother to help him.

Stephen is standing in front of his window, and Daniel moves beside him, touches him on the shoulder.

"Do you wonder if we should have done differently?" Stephen asks, and the distance in his voice makes Daniel realizes that he isn't precisely here. Stephen is thinking of back on that bridge, staring at the communication screen and wondering which bureaucrats found enough inhumanity in themselves to order the death of a world.

Daniel is quiet for a moment, then in reply he moves to his bookshelf and finds a passage. "Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, 'This was their finest hour.'" He reads out loud. Stephen turns to stare at him, and Daniel feels like his body is too heavy for this gravity.

He'd felt the same way on the bridge of the _Absalom_ , watching as Ganymede orbited past, listening to the patter of the engineers repairing the navigational systems. He'd watched the barren ice craters of Ganymede slide by his view, and thought of the moors of Ireland, of his sheep on Paxterra. He'd thought of the volcanic flowers of the moon Rigel VII, and of the delicate spires built by the colonists on Cassiopeia II.

Then Daniel had pressed a few buttons on the bridge, and an electronic voice announced "All crew to bunks. Sleep shift begins in ten minutes. All crew to bunks."

When the room was empty around him, Daniel had stood in front of the main windows and tapped away at _Absalom_ 's main computer bank. It took him three hours, but when Jupiter turned enough to clear a path through the stars, Daniel had looked out through the vastness of the solar system and saw the small dot of Earth, barely larger than the far distant galaxies, not quite a star.

 _I love you,_ he'd thought, and _I'm sorry_ , and _Would God that I might die for thee_.

Then he'd pressed the switch, fired the beam cannon for a five minute burst, and turned it off again. There was a flash of light, and that not-quite-a-star had exploded into supernova brightness for a few precious moments, then faded. He'd managed to return the engines to the normal state before the shockwave reached the ship.

A sheep makes noise outside the window, jerking him back to the present. Stephen is staring at him still, but the moment passes and Stephen turns back to the window, pressing his hand against the glass and leaning as though he could reach out and bury his fingers in the musty earth. Daniel thinks that Stephen is too smart not to know what happened, not to guess, but neither of them says anything. When the din of the rotorblades begins, then fades slowly into the soft buzz of insects, Daniel is still at the window, staring at the land.

 

*

 

 _Anica Freestrom began work on what was to prove the final ship of her career, completed just before her death in 2853 AD. Working with a small and highly classified crew of engineers in an attempt to avert future sabotage attempts, the new ship was declared fit to fly in 2852 AD, and was christened the Absalom, in memory of the betrayal that destroyed the Electra. Captainship on the vessel was given to Freestrom's husband, UK StarFleet Commander Daniel Harwound._

 

*

 

Every year on May 16th, Daniel pays a visit to the third planet from the sun. He sits down beside the great white monument in the Shilmirane Depression, and watches sun rise above the crater rim. The first rays of light show his footprints in the grey ash: rusted red impressions where his passing has revealed the base soil beneath the coat of meteor dust.

As far as the eye can see, he and the pillar of stone are the only features to the flat landscape. Even his small ship is out of view, and only the trail of his footprints marks the way to return.

"I do have regrets," he says to the pillar, quiet and his throat dry. The landscape does not reply. "But I don't regret this." He pauses, leans his helmet against the stone and rests his forehead against the glass, as though he could feel the stone through the thin protective layer. "I've never had bad dreams," he whispers viciously.

And it's true. If he had it to do again, he'd reach for the mechanism on the _Absalom_ once more. Though it sounds poetic to say that the weight of the world is on his shoulders, it isn't true. He remembers staring from the _Absalom_ 's bridge window at a distant, swirling gem of green and blue and loving it with all his heart. He has watched the clouds from above and pointed with the other crew members, shaped scenes from the storms as though they were children.

He remembers Moscow in the rain, when the streets turned coldly magical, when the water puddled radiant beneath streetlamps: whole worlds inverted and looming jagged against reflected sky, the soft breath of a woman on his shoulders, the stars whirling above him and splashing fractal in the rain beneath his feet. He remembers Irish moors in summer, hovering on the breath between dusk and dark, wild and fleeting. And when he remembers the end, he doesn't think that it was worth it. Applying worth is crude, trivializes something so profound that Daniel knows he'll never have the words to express.

And so he sits as the shadows shift around him, until the sun is low on the horizon and casts the pillar, his spacesuit, the whole lonely planet in brilliant shades of red.

"I wish you knew that we were happy out here, your children," he whispers to the void of space.

The sun sets, and the stars are brilliant in the Martian sky.

**Author's Note:**

> The poem toward the beginning of the piece is an excerpt from Heinlein's poem, _The Green Hills of Earth_.


End file.
